Monday, April 2, 2018

Nermine Hammam

I am choosing the Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam who is living and working in London. The reason why I am choosing her is because her vision on how she portrayed the Egyptian revolution in 2011. 

Concerned with the the subjective nature of reality, Hammam subverts the stereotypes, unmasking it and portraying it in a different context. She has a series of art work for the Egyptian army during the recent revolution in 2011. For Hammam, she said, looking at those soldiers made her want to transport them to pleasant places, to reassure them that they would be OK. Most of her work of this series was putting a nice background behind the soldiers who were doing their job. It looked like a postcard taking the subject out of its context and transforming it to a much better context with much better circumstances. 


Hammam mentioned in her statement that as soon as she saw these soldiers, she saw how young they were, they had tiny figures and alienated looks; looks of young men who were looking forward to a bright futures for their country as much as the people marching. These soldiers are the sons of anxious parents. They stood on street corners, squinting at the cacophony of Cairo, observers of history, not the angry stereotypes of masculinity through which our narratives of the army are articulated in media. 






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